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Ellen Pao, center, now interim chief of the social media news site Reddit, outside of the courthouse on Friday. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — One of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capital firms prevailed on Friday over a former partner in a closely watched suit claiming gender discrimination, but hardly got away unscathed.

The plaintiff, Ellen Pao, had accused the firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, of discriminating against her in the course of her employment and eventual dismissal.

The decision handed Kleiner a sweeping victory in a case that had mesmerized Silicon Valley with its salacious details while simultaneously amplifying concerns about the lack of diversity in the technology industry.

Even with her loss in the case, Ms. Pao’s suit succeeded in prompting debate about women in technology and venture capital, said Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University.

“This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular,” Ms. Rhode said. “Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it.”

Kleiner and its lawyers did little to celebrate the win, with the lawyer Lynne C. Hermle saying that it “never occurred to me for a second that a careful and attentive jury like this would find either discrimination or retaliation.” Kleiner issued a statement saying it was committed to supporting women.

Ellen Pao spoke to the news media after a jury rejected her claims of gender discrimination on Friday. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Pao waved to the jury as she left the courtroom for the last time, a smile fixed on her face. “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she said in a brief news conference.

Her suit, filed in Superior Court here, claimed that Kleiner did not promote her because of her gender, that it retaliated against her for complaining, that it failed to prevent gender discrimination and that it fired her in 2012 for complaining.

The suit asked $16 million in compensatory damages plus punitive damages. Ms. Pao is now interim chief of the social media news site Reddit.

After the jurors rejected each of her four claims, they were found to be one vote short on a claim about her termination. For two hours, doubt reigned, the media unspooled possible outcomes and the jury went back to work. In the end, the problem seemed more juror confusion than anything else, and the claim went down with the others.

The jurors said in interviews they did not take on the role of “conscience of this community,” as one of Ms. Pao’s lawyers had urged in the closing arguments. They focused on the facts at hand, and concluded it was Ms. Pao’s own performance that held her back.

One juror, Steve Sammut, 62, said it was difficult coming to a verdict.

“We were split there for a while,” he said, adding that a key point was how Ms. Pao’s reviews at Kleiner deteriorated over time. He also said the witnesses for Kleiner, most of whom came from the firm, helped seal the case.

Another juror, Marshalette Ramsey, 41, said she believed Ms. Pao was discriminated against. The male junior partners at Kleiner “had those same character flaws that Ellen was cited with,” but they were promoted, she said.

“I’m going home emotional,” said Ms. Ramsey.

Ms. Pao joined Kleiner in 2005 as chief of staff to John Doerr, the firm’s best-known partner. She became a junior investing partner, failed to make senior partner and was fired in 2012.

It was the most prominent trial in Silicon Valley in memory for many reasons, including Kleiner Perkins’s reputation as the quintessential venture capital firm. But the suit, filed in 2012, also came as the freewheeling ways of the male-dominated technology industry increasingly drew scrutiny.

Episodes of men behaving badly make the news frequently here, whether it is sexism or harassment in the workplace or just derogatory attitudes toward women. Critics are increasingly drawing a straight line between such behavior and the small percentage of women who are engineers and executives, and the even smaller percentage of women who are venture capitalists.

According to research from Babson College, the percentage of female venture capitalists is 6 percent, down from 10 percent at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999.

The suit and the trial introduced a number of colorful phrases that were said to have been uttered to or about Ms. Pao. Most were heavily disputed by the defense, but they made it appear that Kleiner has been slow to evolve since it was formed in the early 1970s.

“Kleiner Perkins has been significantly tainted by the facts that have come out in this proceedings,” Ms. Rhode of Stanford said.

During the trial, numerous details emerged, including Mr. Doerr’s telling an investigator that Ms. Pao had a “female chip on her shoulder.” Chi-Hua Chien, a partner, said women should not be invited to a dinner with former Vice President Al Gore because they “kill the buzz.” A senior partner at the time, Ray Lane, joked to a junior partner that she should be “flattered” that a colleague showed up at her hotel room door wearing only a bathrobe. Another senior partner, Ted Schlein, seemed never to have heard of the exhortation of Sheryl Sandberg, a senior Facebook executive, that women should “sit at the table,” testifying, “I really don’t think it was a very big deal to us who sits at a table or who does not.”

John Doerr, right, a Kleiner Perkins partner, outside of court earlier this month. During testimony, Mr. Doerr agreed that the percentage of female venture capitalists was “pathetic,” though he came across as an ambivalent figure during his hours on the stand. Credit Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Ms. Pao is married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a Wall Street financier whose hedge fund is bankrupt. Pension funds are suing to recover their money amid accusations of fraud. Kleiner tried to insert Mr. Fletcher into the case, which would have raised questions about Ms. Pao’s motives in bringing suit, but Judge Kahn refused to allow it.

Mr. Fletcher did not attend the trial.

In a sign that the struggle over the place of women in Silicon Valley is only beginning, gender discrimination suits have recently been filed against two prominent companies, Facebook and Twitter.

The suit against Twitter, by a former engineer, Tina Huang, claims that the process for promotion is not clear and is biased in favor of men, a claim that Ms. Pao also made about Kleiner. The suit seeks class-action status. Twitter said in a statement that it was committed “to a diverse and supportive workplace.”

The suit against Facebook is narrower. Chia Hong, a former manager, says she was “discriminated against, harassed, and retaliated against” because of her sex and race, culminating in her termination. Ms. Hong is represented by Lawless & Lawless, one of the firms representing Ms. Pao. Facebook has said that it works “extremely hard” on diversity and believes that it treated the employee in question fairly.

The Kleiner trial, which took 24 days before it went to the jury on Wednesday, offered a glimpse of the Silicon Valley elite at work and play.

Ms. Pao accidentally learned about the dinner Mr. Gore was having because she was living in the same San Francisco building. She met Mr. Fletcher at an exclusive fellowship that Mr. Doerr recommended her for. Even after being fired by Kleiner in 2012, Ms. Pao was paid $33,333 a month for the next six months, plus benefits and bonus. Most Americans could never imagine such handsome remuneration, terminated or not.

But it was competitive and even combative, with sharp elbows and tears. Ms. Pao, it emerged in testimony, compiled a “resentment” chart of colleagues who, she believed, wronged her. People worked through holidays and maternity leaves. The pressure to discover the newest new thing was immense. One great investment — a Google, a Facebook, an Amazon — could make your reputation for life.

As for the rest of life, there was not much of it for the junior partners. One of the stranger points brought up in testimony was how Ms. Pao, before she was married, had dated a colleague for six months without ever realizing he was still living with his wife.

Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving 'sickening' abuse from usersbu Martin Pengelly in New York and Kevin Rawlinson10 July 2015

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‘I’m just another human,’ says outgoing boss, who was forced to quit by users angry about alleged attempts to curb the site’s ‘anything goes’ tone

In an April interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo News, Ellen Pao says women are often undermined in the workplace in countless small ways.

Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, has resigned following a user backlash against the sacking of one of the company’s employees.

Pao, who became an international symbol for gender imbalance in Silicon Valley when she lost a landmark discrimination lawsuit, leaves after around eight months in the job and will be replaced by the site’s co-founder Steve Huffman.

Last week she apologised for letting down users after Reddit sacked its director of talent, Victoria Taylor, who was responsible for the site’s Ask Me Anything forums. Taylor’s dismissal led to a petition from users demanding Pao’s removal that attracted more than 210,000 signatures. It also led to Pao reportedly receiving death threats from users angry at her handling of the situation.

Reddit made the announcement in a statement on Friday afternoon saying it was by “mutual agreement”, even as Pao signalled “a different view” from the board.

But, in a bid to take the sting out of any acrimony, both Reddit’s board member Sam Altman and Pao wrote pleas for compassion after the harassment.

Pao urged those users who attacked her to remember that she was “just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings”. In a resignation statement, she wrote that she has seen “the good, the bad and the ugly on Reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity”.

She wrote: “Everyone attacked on Reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said.”

Altman said that it was “sickening to see some of the things” that the site’s users had written about Pao.

He wrote: “The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is internet between you.”

“If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.”

Disagreements, he said, were not a problem. But, in an apparent reference to messages sent to Pao, he wrote that death threats would not be tolerated and that users who sent them would be banned.

Pao’s relationship with Reddit’s users deteriorated when the site, which was known for its “anything goes” atmosphere, began an anti-harassment drive in May this year.

It caused further anger when that led to the shutting down of a handful of sections that “allow their communities to use [them] as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action”.

Reddit’s management was accused by some of seeking to limit free speech, although the site’s bosses insisted they were “banning behaviour, not ideas”.

Relations soured further with the dismissal of Taylor. Many of the unpaid moderators who keep Reddit’s subbranches – or subreddits – running, shut down their sections in protest.

Pao wrote that she was leaving Reddit, which attracted more than 163 million visitors last month, because the “board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles”.

Altman’s statement said: “We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to Reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth.

“She brought a face to Reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that.”

Regarding Huffman, the statement said: “We’re very happy to have [him] back. Product and community are the two legs of Reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does.

“He has the added bonus of being a founder with 10 years of Reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of ‘cofounder’.”

Pao was hired by Reddit in April 2013. In November 2014 she was appointed interim chief executive after the resignation of Yishan Wong, who left after an argument with the board over the running of the company.

Pao made international headlines earlier this year when she lost a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit against a former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

She was told to pay legal costs of nearly $1m (£644,000), which her former employer indicated it would waive if she agreed not to appeal the court’s decision. However, it emerged last month that she had decided to go ahead with a legal challenge.

Pao’s case raised issues surrounding gender inequality at elite Silicon Valley technology and venture capital firms. Pao’s lawyers argued she was an accomplished junior partner passed over for promotion because the firm she worked for, Kleiner Perkins, used different standards to judge men and women. Pao claimed she was fired when she complained about discrimination.

During the case lawyers said Pao was subjected to demeaning treatment including being cut out of emails and meetings by a male colleague with whom she broke off an affair and being given a book of erotic poetry by a partner at the company.

Kleiner Perkins’ attorney Lynne Hermle countered during the trial that Pao failed as an investor at the company and sued to get a big payout as she was being shown the door.

Pao lost the case, but it was seen as a watershed moment, as former employees at Twitter and Facebook launched discrimination cases in its wake.

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The online discussion forum said in a blog post that it is ‘unhappy with harassing behavior’ and plans to review individual cases and possibly block users

Reddit: ‘We’ve seen many conversations devolve into attacks against individuals.’ Photograph: Public Domain

Reddit, the online discussion forum known for its free-wheeling ethos, is enacting an anti-harassment policy while still trying to keep its roots as a place for free expression.

Reddit said in a blog post on Thursday that it is “unhappy with harassing behavior” on the site and its survey data shows that users are too. It has been reviewing its community guidelines for the past six months.

“We’ve seen many conversations devolve into attacks against individuals,” the San Francisco company wrote in a blog post, adding that it is also seeing more and different types of harassment than in the past. For example, some users are harassing people across platforms and posting links on Reddit to private information on other sites, it said.

Reddit’s interim CEO is Ellen Pao, who this year lost a high-profile gender-discrimination lawsuit against a prominent venture capital firm. That case highlighted issues of gender imbalance and working conditions for women in Silicon Valley.

Reddit said in its blog post that it defines harassment as “systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone”, making them fear for their safety or conclude that the social-networking and news site is not a safe place to express ideas.

Users being harassed can report the message or post via email. Reddit said it will handle each situation separately, and responses could include banning users.

Earlier this year, Reddit said it would remove photos, videos and links with explicit content if the person in the image hasn’t given permission for it to be posted.

That change came about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites, including Reddit and Twitter.

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Clone site buckling under influx of new users seeking a ‘censorship-free’ experience after Reddit banned five subreddits

Reddit’s Alien logo and CEO Ellen Pao, who has received much abuse from angry Redditors. Photograph: Getty Images

Disgruntled Redditors have decamped en masse to a Swiss-based clone of Reddit called Voat after the site’s administrators banned five subreddits for harassing behaviour.

In response to the deluge, Voat, which mimics Reddit’s design and layout (albeit using “subverses” rather than “subreddits”) was forced to ask for bitcoin donations to keep the site live.

“We are sorry to see Reddit change like this, in this way, in such an accelerated fashion. We would have never anticipated such events,” wrote Atko, Voat’s founder and chief technology officer.

“We are not ready for such a huge influx of new users and haven’t prepared for such a large and sudden increase either.”

The site, which describes itself as “a censorship-free community platform”, has since started asking for bitcoin donations to keep the servers running.

Among the subreddits banned from Reddit were “hamplanethatred” and “fatpeoplehate”, both of which were focussed on harassing and abusing overweight people, and racist forum “shitniggerssay”. Reddit’s admin staff emphasised in a statement that “we’re banning behaviour, not ideas.”

Redditor splattypus summarised the rationale in the Out of the Loop subreddit: “As long as you can keep it 100% confined within the subreddit, anything within legal bounds still goes. As soon as content/discussion/‘politics’ of the subreddit extend out to other users on reddit, communities, or people on other social media platforms with the intent to harass, harangue, hassle, shame, berate, bemoan, or just plain fuck with, that’s when there’s problems. [Fatpeoplehate] et al. was apparently struggling with this part.”

Much of the opprobrium from Reddit users has been focused on the site’s chief executive, Ellen Pao, who took over the top job in November 2014. In March, the site made the first overtures towards cleaning up its notoriously uncontrollable community, adding new rules to its privacy policy preventing the posting of “involuntary pornography”. Now that it’s tightened up its stance on harassment as well, Pao is personally in the firing line. New posts on the front page of Voat include the declaration that “I am friend-zoaning [sic] Reddit, soon to be my ex. Her mother Ellen is a crazy controlling bitch”.

Elsewhere, Reddit has returned to normal. After a day of posts about the multiple bans, the site is now dominated by discussion of Bethesda Softwork’s upcoming post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 4.

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Chief executive Ellen Pao is target of derogatory posts after she leads campaign to clean up harassment on the site

Ellen Pao, interim chief executive of Reddit. Users have begun a petition calling on her to resign for what they say is an attack on the free speech they previously enjoyed. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Rebellious Reddit users have swamped the site with derogatory comments about staff and images of overweight people after its decision to ban several subforums.

On Reddit’s r/all page there was an overnight deluge of derogatory postings about Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive, who has led a campaign to clean up harassment on the site.

Five subreddits were banned in total: two which made fat-shaming comments, one racist, one transphobic and one which targeted gamers. One of the subreddits, r/fatpeoplehate, had more than 150,000 subscribers; the others all had under 4,000.

Since the announcement, many alternative obesity-related subreddits have been created, and users have begun a petition calling on Pao to resign for what they claim is an attack on the unfettered free speech they had previously enjoyed on the site.

Crude photoshopped images of Pao on an obese body were appearing, and the popular photography subreddit r/pics was briefly flooded with images of overweight people.

Wednesday’s announcement made it clear that direct attacks on identifiable individuals were the issue, and implied that the site would still notionally allow racism and other kinds of hate speech, if an individual was not the target. Users have argued that subreddits are their own, insular communities, with active policies not to link to other forums, and it would be unusual for anyone unsuspecting to come across them.

In recent years, Reddit has made small inroads into the free-for-all atmosphere that had existed on the site, closing down forums dedicated to suggestive images of children and young teens, “creep shots” of unaware women, as well as a subreddit that had distributed pictures of hacked celebrity nudes.

Reddit bosses have, however, allowed many pages critical of them to exist, including r/chairmanpao and r/paoyongyang.

Wednesday’s announcement about the subreddit closures said staff wanted “as little involvement as possible but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment”.

“We’re banning behaviour, not ideas,” the statement continued. “We want to be open about our involvement: we will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action.” The statement was posted by Pao, as well as Jessica Moreno, head of community and support, and founder Alexis Ohanian.

How Ellen Pao lost her job but survived Reddit's swamp of trollsby Beth Winegarner12 July 2015

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Silicon Valley’s most controversial executive has personified the discrimination and harassment directed at women in technology and on the internet. A look back at her landmark gender lawsuit and her ouster at Reddit reveals how much – and how little – has changed

When Ellen Pao took the witness stand four months ago, accusing the most powerful venture-capital firm in the most powerful new industry of pervasive sexism against her and powerful women like her, she talked about the “right path”.

Pao’s own attorney asked the 46-year-old executive why she continued to fight Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the firm that accused her of being a bad employee, even as she had become the top executive at Reddit, the influential social-media website that is infamous for nothing if not its trolls. The site’s former contributors – Pao now among them – describe it as a kind of misogynist fire swamp where “harassment swarms”, even and especially for an accidental feminist champion like its suddenly former CEO.

“I think there should be equal opportunities for women and men to be venture capitalists,” Pao said calmly that March morning as reporters, technology observers and a jury listened closely to the woman her co-workers said lacked “thought leadership”.

“I wanted to make sure my story was told.”

Now that Pao has suddenly resigned from Reddit, amid both user revolt and increasing recrimination from the landmark workplace-discrimination suit she lost this year, that story has only become more intriguing. Both the international profile of her trial and her ensuing decision to curb Reddit’s trolls made Pao a champion for women and minorities in 2015, and those who have followed her from the courtroom to the subreddit comments remained assured that such a bold legacy would continue.

Reddit board member Sam Altman said after Pao’s apparently mutually agreed exit on Friday that Reddit would not reverse its crackdown on subreddits devoted to harassment – and at least one moderator who participated in recent protests against Pao said those changes were among her best decisions during eight transformative, tumultuous months at the helm.

“Ellen specifically stated: ‘We’re banning behavior, not ideas,’” Jared Shenefield, who moderates Reddit’s cooking forum, told the Guardian on Saturday. “I think that was a good move – probably the best move since she became the interim CEO.”

Pao stepped down amid massive protests from moderators like Shenefield, upset by the sudden firing of talent director Victoria Taylor, who coordinated Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” feature, and from users angered by the shuttering of five hate-filled forums, including r/fatpeoplehate and r/transfags. A petition calling for Pao’s ouster snowballed, gathering more than 213,000 signatures.

Pao denied that the unrest drove her out: “Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles,” she wrote in a Reddit post.

Pao’s two-plus years deep in the business world’s ultimate battle of modern sexism and out in front of corporate reform is a lesson for the victims of that bias.

The “terrorists” of the internet have their first scalp, lending credibility to what one industry insider called “the Pao-haters”.

Pao’s escape from “hell” – as more than one Silicon Valley watcher put it – has also left an industry reckoning with the all-too-familiar reality of gender and racial bias.

REDDIT SHITSHOW CONTINUES UNABATED

Mike Isaac, reporting for the NYT:

Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board on Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure.

Reddit: a terrible, childish community posting on a site owned by a terrible, dumbass company. Good luck to the next CEO.

-- Daring Fireball, by John Gruber

Even in defeat, it appears, Pao still serves as an emblem of the tech world’s backward treatment of women and minorities – and an example of how to fight back.

Through a spokeswoman, Pao declined to comment specifically on her resignation or future plans, and her attorneys did not respond to a request for an update on her pending court appeal. Still, a look back at her journey through legal battles and unpopular reforms at Reddit reveals just how galvanizing and transformative this high-tech heroine has become.

The trial that shook Silicon Valley – and shocked the world

Ellen Pao speaks on ABC.

Improbable as it may have seemed for the most famous fighter in the war against workplace discrimination, Pao began consulting for Reddit, of all places, soon after she was fired from Kleiner Perkins in late 2012.

Even as the social media site was confronting conspiracy theories around the Boston marathon bombing and corporate branded posts, Pao took a full-time position in business development and strategic partnerships for the site in April 2013.

When Reddit CEO Yishan Wong resigned suddenly last November, Pao stepped in. Wong later wrote on the Q&A site Quora that the top job at Reddit was “incredibly stressful and draining”, and after two and a half years, the work was having “significantly detrimental” effects on his personal life.

Altman, the Reddit board member who also serves as president of seed funder Y Combinator, said in an “Ask Me Anything” chat on Friday that when Wong quit, Pao stepped in. “She walked into an incredibly difficult situation and [moved] the ball a good bit down the field for reddit,” he said.

Pao, a self-described introvert, has said that she never set out to become a feminist figurehead. She was hired at Kleiner Perkins in 2005 as senior partner John Doerr’s chief of staff, but Doerr later helped her transition into a junior investment role, where she bumped up against the numerous slights that formed the basis for her sex-bias lawsuit.

Another of Kleiner Perkins’ junior partners, Ajit Nazre, allegedly pressured Pao into having an affair. After she broke it off, he began retaliating against her, leaving her out of crucial email discussions and in-person meetings with potential clients that could have led to important deals, she testified.

Although Pao reported Nazre’s behavior to higher-ups, he stayed on at Kleiner Perkins; his only reprimand was receiving a smaller-than-expected bonus. Nazre was later fired after coming on to another junior partner – but not before he was promoted to a highly lucrative senior-partner position.

Pao portrayed her experience with Nazre as representative of the sexist culture at Kleiner Perkins and, to some extent, in Silicon Valley as a whole. She and a former partner at the firm testified about key networking events that excluded women, including a ski trip with potential business partners and a dinner party at the home of former vice-president Al Gore. She and another female partner were asked to play secretary at a Kleiner Perkins event; when they complained, at least one higher-up failed to understand why the request was offensive.

Meanwhile, Pao’s superiors testified that she was repeatedly criticized in performance reviews and ultimately fired for her behavior – behavior that is often lauded in men but criticized in women. She was accused of being too pushy and aggressive, and for elbowing in on other partners’ business deals. Paradoxically, her Kleiner Perkins colleagues also accused her of being too quiet, saying that she failed to “own the room”.

But the death-by-a-thousand-cuts sexism Pao described in court, and which many women report experiencing in the office daily, often isn’t enough to prove discrimination. The jury found that Pao’s gender wasn’t a factor in Kleiner Perkins’ decision not to make her a senior partner, and that her complaints were not a substantial reason for her termination.

Immediately following that verdict in March, Pao insisted that her loss in the landmark case, however devastating, did not mean that she had failed. To be sure, her story was being told – not just in the live blogs of technology websites read by insiders and discussed on Twitter at-replies, but across the world.

“If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she said after the verdict. “The problem of gender discrimination in venture capital has received attention around the globe. While today’s outcome is a disappointment, I take consolation in knowing that people really listened.”

On Twitter, women were already showing that they had listened. The #ThanksEllen hashtag was lofted by users who were grateful Pao had taken on on Silicon Valley’s entrenched sexism.

“We don’t question the verdict; we appreciate the risk she took by telling her story,” Lori Hobson, a business developer at Function Engineering, said on Twitter. Another group took out a full-page newspaper ad that said, simply, “Thanks Ellen.”

As it turned out, Pao was just getting started.

The fall of ‘Chairman Pao’ – and Reddit’s unfinished business

By the time Pao’s trial began in February, pervasive discrimination and harassment directed at women in technology and on the internet had already metasticized from the stuff of at-replies to an international conversation – if not an all-out confrontation.

A video went viral last October illustrating more than 100 catcalls and come-ons a woman encountered during an eight-hour walk through New York City. The trolls came out for the maelstrom known as GamerGate to shine a spotlight on the violent harassment and threats lobbed at outspoken women in video-game culture.

That Pao challenged discriminatory patterns at Kleiner Perkins and, by virtue of that extended conversation, the rest of Silicon Valley, raised unspoken questions about her leadership at Reddit. Forums there served as a hive-mind for GamerGate, hosted leaked naked celebrity photos and fostered attacks on women, overweight people and minorities.

“Reddit can be seen as a swamp of standing water that’s been allowed to breed pestilent mosquitoes,” said Katherine Cross, a former Reddit moderator and PhD student in sociology at the City University of New York, where she studies online abuse. “Even if one ignores the site, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore its effluence. Harassment swarms are ginned up by the website’s more toxic users and communities.”

Although Pao, who had taken over as Reddit’s interim leader four months earlier, was in the courtroom every day of her month-long trial, her thoughts clearly hadn’t strayed far from Reddit. Within days of the Kleiner Perkins verdict, Pao ended salary negotiations at Reddit, a tradition which studies have shown often put women at an economic disadvantage.

Pao had sought roughly $16m in past and future lost wages at trial, arguing that without Kleiner Perkins’ bias, she would have made a lot more money. The topic of pay inequity was fresh in Pao’s mind.

Two months later, Reddit announced a ban on any forums, or subreddits, “that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action,” Pao wrote.

Cross, the former moderator and sometimes a target of GamerGate’s vitriol, called Pao’s reforms inspirational. “It was the first time someone at the site had publicly suggested the site had a responsibility to both its non-toxic users and the wider internet,” she told the Guardian.

Not everyone agreed. Angry Reddit users called her “Chairman Pao” and compared her to Adolf Hitler.

Mark VerHill, a longtime Reddit member, launched a petition under a pseudonym, calling for Pao to step down as CEO. He said users accused her of “suing her way to the top” and that her policies – championed by the women and minorities those policies were protecting – would run Reddit into the ground.

Other users and moderators felt similarly, insisting that communication channels between the site’s leaders, its paid forum administrators and its unpaid volunteers was nothing short of abysmal.

When the popular moderator Taylor was fired this month, the Pao reckoning began in earnest, and a number of moderators closed more than 300 subreddits for 24 hours.

Shenefield, the moderator who took /r/Cooking dark, said the revolt was meant to be pacifistic, not the beginning of an ouster: “Doing a blackout was the way to have our voices heard without being so hateful,” he told the Guardian. “It worked.”

Shut out of their favorite forums, Reddit users flocked to the petition, bringing more media attention to the tumult.

On Monday, Pao publicly acknowledged the communication gaps and apologized for Reddit’s “long history of mistakes”, but said it would take time for Reddit to deliver concrete results.

Less than five days later, she was out the door.

The accidental success of a user revolt against the accidental feminist hero of the Valley came as a surprise to many, especially considering that Reddit board members had expressed interest in hiring her as the site’s permanent CEO, as Kleiner Perkins attorneys told a San Francisco judge in February.

But Altman said in his AMA that wouldn’t happen. He urged Reddit’s community to learn to balance authenticity and compassion, saying that co-founder and new CEO Steve Huffman’s biggest challenge “will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward”.

Altman denied that the petition or the hateful words aimed at Pao had anything to do with Pao’s resignation, saying he was surprised by how cruel Reddit users had been to her.

“While she wasn’t the CEO Reddit needed, she was not deserving of all the hate she received,” said Shenefield, the current Reddit moderator.

Journalist Susan Antilla, who broke the story of sexual harassment at Smith Barney and other Wall Street titans in the 1990s and later wrote Tales from the Boom-Boom Room about those scandals, noted that anyone hoping to change the tenor on Reddit – whose millions of users trend toward 18- to 29-year-old men – will face an uphill battle.

“The assumption by Pao-haters is that Taylor did nothing wrong and that Pao and management were wrong to fire her,” she said. “This is the tech world, folks, where firings and other disruptions are worn like a badge. Suck it up.”

Alexis Ohanion, who co-founded Reddit with Huffman in 2005, revealed in a Reddit post on Friday that firing Taylor was his decision, adding that Pao’s story is far from over: “I have admired her fearlessness and calm throughout our time together and look forward to following her impact on Silicon Valley and beyond.”

Cross, the former moderator turned target of the trolls, agreed, saying that Pao became a target herself – precisely because she made gender a topic of discussion and acknowledged that prejudice and harassment were as much of an unsolved problem as she left them.

“I think she’ll continue to be seen, for good and for ill, as someone who refused to be compliant about sexism,” she said of Pao, “both in the workplace and on social media.”

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Photo Illustration by Alex Williams/The Daily Beast

Internet communities like Reddit have always been toxic environments that survive on the backs of unpaid labor, and attempts to corporatize them fail because of it.

Some of the worst trolls on the Internet are celebrating victory, as embattled interim CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao stepped down yesterday after what can charitably be described as a month or so of pure hell.

Let’s review the story briefly, since there’s a gushing torrent of BS that’s accompanying the joyful celebrating of Pao’s departure among Reddit’s userbase. Yes, there was a petition calling for Pao’s removal among Reddit’s users that crested 200,000 signatures before she stepped down.

The stated reason for this petition was the firing of Victoria Taylor, the Reddit administrator responsible for coordinating Reddit’s celebrated “AMA” or Ask Me Anything sessions where celebrities fielded unscripted questions from the users.

The narrative goes that after the loss of a beloved figure responsible for much of Reddit’s success—when you hear about Reddit in the media in a positive light, it’s usually because of a celebrity AMA—many subreddits were blacked out by the moderators in protest.

Now, the evil corporate interloper Ellen Pao, who was responsible for kicking out one of the few Reddit employees who really understood the subculture, has finally resigned due to the righteous blowback from her actions. One of Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman, is coming back to lead Reddit again alongside his co-founder Alex Ohanian (who goes by u/kn0thing on Reddit), and all is well with the world again.

Sound good? Well, not so fast.

First of all, Ellen Pao didn’t fire Victoria Taylor. It turns out that was a decision Ohanian made in his capacity as “executive chairman,” as he appears to admit in a Reddit comment in the wake of Pao’s departure. For people whose primary motivation to hate on Reddit really was that they fired Victoria, it seems like an apology to Pao and a redirection of hate toward Ohanian is in order—one which has not been forthcoming.

The problem is that Reddit has been trying to sell a false bill of goods to investors all this time—something that Ohanian and Huffman and other true believers still cling to against all evidence.

Okay, some might argue, but the job of a CEO is to take the heat on behalf of her subordinates; no matter how unfair it might seem, the buck stops at the chief executive’s desk, not the executive chairman’s.

But it’s not just that Pao is resigning over a bad decision Ohanian made and Ohanian himself is staying. It’s that Pao was targeted by constant, vitriolic abuse during her tenure as CEO, abuse that even Reddit’s board—which normally tends to shamelessly flatter Reddit’s userbase when they talk about them at all—had to call out as “sickening.”

A lot of the personal attacks on Pao were racial—google “Chairman Pao” if you want to see how nasty redditors can be, and how they think repetitive name-calling on the level of a sixth grade bully is the pinnacle of online wit. Even more common than the racial remarks, though, were the ones digging at Pao because of her gender. In the interest of common decency I won’t tell you how to find those on Google, though you can probably figure it out.

Lots of these people are using Victoria Taylor as a fig leaf, claiming that because their anger is in response to a woman’s firing, the hate mob they’ve joined can’t possibly be misogynistic in its origins or its approach. But of course the hashtag #RedditRevolt didn’t start a week ago with the firing of Victoria Taylor, it started a month ago with the closure of the popular subreddit r/fatpeoplehate—a community based on, well, sending hateful messages to fat people (mostly women) who had the temerity to leave their photos on Facebook where redditors could find them instead of shunning all human contact and killing themselves.

We don’t know whether Pao was responsible for that decision, either, but that’s when the “Chairman Pao” meme and others started. Giving those people the cover of legitimacy by giving them a casus belli that doesn’t involve having to say the phrase “Fat People Hate” to major media outlets was Reddit’s biggest own goal here.

And, surprise surprise, it was an own goal scored by Ohanian, who wasn’t the one being blasted with death threats, rape threats, and images of himself being photoshopped into porn; who was, in fact, so clueless about the seething hate mob on Reddit that he—not Pao—made a callous joke about “popcorn” when the backlash against Victoria’s firing started. (And lo and behold, he was not fired.)

Internet communities like Reddit have always been toxic environments that survive on the backs of unpaid labor, and attempts to corporatize them because of it.

The real irony is that the legitimate anger behind the Reddit blackout, the reason the moderators of “respectable” subreddits like r/Books and r/Science found themselves throwing in with refugees from r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay, was about bad behavior that mostly originated from subreddits like r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay.

The open letter sent to Reddit about the blackout calls Victoria’s firing “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” stating that moderators were frustrated over Reddit failing to provide either administrative tools to let them do their job or put them in touch with Reddit employees who could. The specific problems called out are “brigading” and “alternative accounts”—that is, the fact that Reddit is known for people on nasty troll subreddits organizing to troll other subreddits or other websites en masse, and that banning individual accounts that do this is nearly pointless considering how easy it is to instantly come back under an alternate username.

Victoria was a beloved Reddit staff member precisely because she did a lot of work to shield VIPs from this side of Reddit when AMA time rolled around—and even then she wasn’t able to keep the racists of Reddit from damaging Reddit’s brand by flinging shit at Jesse Jackson’s AMA.

The problem is that Reddit has been trying to sell a false bill of goods to investors all this time—something that Ohanian and Huffman and other true believers still cling to against all evidence.

This is the idea that you can build a functional community without having to spend any money or effort to manage it—that it just happens spontaneously through the “wisdom of crowds.” The Web 2.0 dream has always been to outsource all of the hard jobs to your users—that unpaid enthusiasts will do all the work of creating your content, curating your content, and promoting your content out of love, and all you have to do is pay some techies to keep the lights on.

Reddit is built on this premise. Anyone can create a subreddit and be its absolute, iron-fisted (but unpaid) dictator on the theory that if they do a bad job of it someone will just create another subreddit and everyone will vote with their feet.

Reddit’s core feature, the upvoting/downvoting system, is rooted in the hope that democracy can replace curation—that if everyone who sees a comment is allowed to throw a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on it, the cream will rise to the top and the shit will sink out of sight without anyone having to do anything.

As a result, Reddit, with a userbase of millions and ambitions to be the “front page of the Internet,” is managed almost entirely by thousands of unpaid, sometimes anonymous volunteers and has an actual staff of less than a hundred people, all of whom are required to live in San Francisco in the name of efficiency (which may be the real reason Victoria was fired).

We can see how well that’s worked out. In practice, the ability of anyone to spawn their own subreddit plus the upvoting/downvoting mechanism leads to each subreddit being an angry little fiefdom fiercely dedicated to its own idea of consensus where dissenting opinions get downvoted into oblivion. A community that’s seen to have a particularly obnoxious bias, say, r/Android supposedly being in the tank for Google Nexus devices, will develop a community focused on attacking the first community for being a “circlejerk” (r/Androidcirclejerk) that has the exact opposite bias and exists to post memes mocking Google Nexus devices for how they’re overrated trash. Eventually one community will lose its patience and “brigade” another community, flooding it with hostile posts in order to show the other side how wrong they are, and mods are forced to stay up all night banning people until everything settles down again (and several users, usually female, have quit Reddit for good after being blasted with death threats).

This is exactly as petty and stupid as it sounds. It’s also as alienating to ordinary, non-basement-dwelling troll users as it sounds. It’s the reason Reddit has gotten a reputation for being attractive to creepy, obsessive people for whom the inherently toxic environment is a reasonable price to pay to be around people like them. These are often people who have very strong opinions that polite society, for obvious reasons, disapproves of—for being a haven for pedophiles, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and unrepentant sex criminals.

This is not good for Reddit’s brand. This probably has to do with why Reddit has apparently, for all the hype about the size of its userbase, never been profitable. This is why I personally stay the hell away from Reddit and advise my friends, especially my female friends, to do so as well.

Yes, Reddit does have content that is, as Pao put it in her resignation letter, “off-the-wall inspiring” alongside the stuff that makes one “doubt humanity.”

But that comes at a cost. The frustrated mods of the Reddit blackout lost their temper because they’ve been asked to do thousands of hours of unpaid, grueling, emotionally draining labor fighting against the trolls in order to keep the “respectable” side of Reddit usable. Out of the 70 or 80 paid employees at Reddit, Victoria Taylor was one of the only ones who ever participated in that side of the work it takes to keep Reddit alive, and Reddit apparently valued that so little that they let her go.

Specifically, Alexis Ohanian let her go. The same guy who founded Reddit on the principle that unregulated “free speech” will police itself, apparently failing to understand that it was people’s ability to trust Victoria to manage trolls and haters and keep the worst side of Reddit suppressed that allowed AMAs to happen at all.

This is a consistent problem not just for Reddit but for the whole Web 2.0 ethos. This denial that managing a community is hard work, this culture that makes millionaires of the “makers” who write the code for social media platforms but pays the “maintainers” who spend every day keeping them usable minimum wage or nothing at all.

It’s baked into the libertarian free speech absolutism of Silicon Valley culture. People like the founders of Reddit treat being “content-neutral” as almost a religious edict. Reddit won’t take even the smallest proactive steps to “restrict speech” unless forced—hence the long, controversial process it took to get rid of subreddits as openly awful as r/jailbait and r/beatingwomen. Thus we get the ridiculous spectacle of Reddit moderators staying up all night “playing whack-a-mole” to laboriously take down links to illegal content as they popped up while then-CEO Yishan Wong piously intoned “Every man is responsible for his own soul” as the reasoning for not taking down the subreddit specifically created to host those links.

That’s why, even as the racists of Reddit melt down over the closure of r/ShitNiggersSay, its sister subreddit r/CoonTown remains proudly open for business, because unlike r/ShitNiggersSay, r/CoonTown hasn’t been proven to “brigade” other sites—and Ohanian (again, not the supposed iron-fisted left-wing enforcer Ellen Pao) said, “We’re banning behavior, not ideas.”

And yet even this extremely weak response to bad behavior has launched a “revolt,” spreading hundreds of clones of r/FatPeopleHate all over the site in protest. Moderators of big subreddits complaining that Reddit leaves them alone and unequipped against hordes of trolls filling up their content with sludge get co-opted into a “movement” of those selfsame trolls defending their right to throw sludge. When Ellen Pao finally resigns after enduring weeks of this garbage, the top-voted commenter celebrating her departure is a troll with an account named for the Charleston shooter.

What can we learn from this, aside from what we already knew: that boards of directors tend to put female CEOs in charge in times of crisis because they predictably serve as useful lightning rods for backlash and hate?

That Reddit has to be dragged kicking and screaming to even be slightly more of a safe, decent place for ordinary people to hang out and to be slightly less of a massive lawsuit-waiting-to-happen stuffed with terrifying harassing trolls. That what good reputation Reddit enjoys, it enjoys due to the uncompensated labor of people whom Reddit has been abandoning to fight the trolls alone for years. And that top brass at Reddit like Alexis Ohanian are so deeply in denial about this that they’ll fire one of the women keeping Reddit from fully sinking into the mire and let another one of them be hounded out of her job without ever suggesting the site has a fundamental problem that needs to be fixed.

This is the face of Web 2.0, folks. This is the boondoggle they’ve been selling to all the Web 2.0 investors—that the “social web” is an untapped oil well when in reality it’s a seething underground pool of excrement and bile.

Pao tells us that upon her resignation she bluntly told the board that it was impossible for her to meet their six-month growth goals—either in terms of attracting new users to Reddit from among the normal, decent portion of the human race, or in terms of attracting revenue from advertisers who want to reach said new users without wading through a sea of racist memes and semen-stained photographs.

Some say that the “failure to meet growth goals” is a lie to cover that she’s actually leaving because of incessant harassment. I would argue that those are the same thing—that the reaction to Pao neatly demonstrates why Reddit’s attempt to monetize its social web have failed, why all attempts to monetize the social web have been extremely rough going—because the social web itself is poisoned.

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Pao posted a statement on Reddit on Friday: ‘We are going to figure this out and fix it.’ Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters

More than 150,000 Reddit users have signed an online petition calling for Ellen Pao, the site’s interim chief executive, to step down. The petition arose after Victoria Taylor, the director of talent who managed the site’s popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) subreddit, was fired.

“Action must be taken to prevent Reddit from being further run into the ground,” the petition said. “Stop Ellen Pao from destroying the Reddit.com community by making her step down as CEO of Reddit Inc.”

After Taylor left the company last Thursday, around 300 subreddits, or discussion areas, on topics including gaming, science, history and cinema were shut down by their moderators as a form of protest.

By Sunday, most of the subreddits were back up and the petition was on its way to reaching 150,000 signatures.

In answer to a request for comment, Reddit provided a statement that Pao first released to the press on Friday.

“I want to apologize for how we handled the transition yesterday,” the statement said. “We should have informed the moderators earlier and provided more detail on the transition plan. We are working to make improvements and create the best experience for our users and we aren’t always perfect. Our community is what makes Reddit, Reddit and we let you down.”

In interviews on Friday, Pao apologized , but her remarks did not satisfy Reddit users because they were not made on the site, where such users felt Pao would have been communicating directly with them. Pao did post a statement on Reddit on Friday, in which she said: “We are going to figure this out and fix it.”

In March, Pao lost a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Pao and her lawyer argued that Kleiner was a boys’ club and that Pao was fired because she was a woman. The jury found in favor of the company, which claimed that Pao was fired because she was bad at her job, was divisive and not a team player.

According to the New York Times, which spoke to Pao when the petition had about 13,000 signatures, the call for her resignation did not faze her.

“It’s an exciting job. We’re doing a lot behind the scenes that people have not seen yet,” Pao said. “Most of the community is made up of thoughtful people, and they can appreciate what we all do, even if we don’t always agree.”

Pao was hired by Reddit in April 2013. “Being part of a community of people who care is inspiring and energizing,” she said then, in a statement. “Reddit has so much to offer so many people, and I’m excited to find partners to help make Reddit even more awesome.”

In November 2014, she was appointed interim chief executive after the resignation of Yishan Wong.

In September 2011, when Reddit looked to hire a CEO, a company statement said: “Make no mistake, Reddit owes its past, present, and future success to the community. We wouldn’t seriously consider any individuals for the CEO position unless they understood the community and were passionate about serving its needs.”

That is what users signing the petition say Pao – who has offended some by cracking down on trolling – does not do.

“A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao … has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground. Alternative sites to Reddit.com have sprung up and have received vast amounts of traffic within the recent months,” the petition says.

“The communication between the Reddit administration team to its subreddit moderators is very lacking and rather unsettling after years of empty promises to the moderators to improve and provide tools to help run subreddits, and ultimately Reddit as a whole, smoothly.”

When the petition surpassed 100,000 signatures on Sunday, its creators posted an update noting that Pao and chairman and site co-founder Alexis Ohanian had issued apologies via comments and interviews via news outlets.

“Along with their apologies were, again, empty promises to improve their communication with the community and provide tools for the moderators as they have promised to do so years ago,” the users behind the petition said.

“As of right now they have not issued an apology in a site-wide announcement or blogpost. It is sad that they have resorted to the news rather than addressing us, their consumers.”

Those behind the petition urged those who signed it to keep “keep spreading, promoting, and supporting.

“We will not stop until we see action taken,” they said.

Advance Publications, which owns Reddit, is under no obligation to respond to the petition.

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The lawsuit has revealed a side to the outside world of the very unique social dynamics at play in the male dominated Silicon Valley, where resentment, risk-mitigation, denial and insecurities lie carefully at balance in one of the most discreet places in the world.

There is no question that men dominate the power in the Valley, creating a tightly-knit and closely-guarded community of deep-pocketed investors and visionary entrepreneurs where billions of dollars rest in the hands of few. The individuals that run this world are, by and large, extremely well-educated and hard-working, including engineers, scientists, and all other geeks at heart.

Ellen Pao is the quintessential reflection of how the values of conservative respect, self-restraint and denial manifest as Ellen still remains working at Kleiner Perkins as the scandolous details of her public lawsuit unfold revealing accusations of her collegues. The founder of the firm, John Doerr, publicly denies and refutes her statements, and to date Pao has not quit (nor does she plan to).

Regardless of the outcome, Ellen Pao is bold for confronting one of the most powerful firms in this country. The public filing of the case, the firms handling of it and the Valley’s reaction to it demonstrates that an ostensibly exclusionary culture will face tough questions if it continues to defend (or quietly deny) its actions, particularly when there is so much money and power on the line.

THE SITUATION

On May 10, 2012, Ellen Pao filed a lawsuit against Kleiner claiming she faced sexual harassment and discrimination there over a six-year period. Pao contends that beginning in 2006, she was sexually harassed by Ajit Nazre, an investment partner who left the firm last year. When she complained to senior partners and others at the firm, the suit says, they retaliated against her, limiting her career advancement and income. On June 13, 2012, Kleiner Perkins released a statement (the final day the firm could do so) denying all claims made by Pao. Pao remains employed by the firm.

THE ALLEGATIONS

Ms. Pao’s suit says Kleiner Perkins investment partner Ajit Nazre began making unwanted sexual advances toward her in 2006, and that when she rebuffed him, he “engaged in offensive, obstructionist and difficult behavior” toward her. It says Ms. Pao “succumbed to Mr. Nazre’s insistence on sexual relations on two or three occasions,” but informed him in October 2006 that she did not want a personal relationship with him.

Pao’s suit contends that although she discussed Nazre’s behavior with Kleiner Perkins’s human resources staff and senior partners — including John Doerr, Ray Lane and Ted Schlein — they did not follow up on her complaints. Instead, it says, the firm punished her for speaking out by removing her from the board of a start-up, asking her to transfer to the firm’s offices in China and giving her less of the firm’s profits. Pao’s suit also contends that Randy Komisar, another investment partner with the firm, also made unwanted sexual advances toward her.

More broadly, her suit claims that there was a pattern of sexual harassment at the firm, citing at least one other investment partner and three administrative assistants, all women, complained about Mr. Nazre’s behavior. That prompted an independent investigation, and Nazre left the firm, though Kleiner declined to say whether the two were related. The suit says that on several occasions the firm’s partners held events for other partners and entrepreneurs that purposely excluded women, including one dinner organized by another partner, Chi-Hua Chien. In response to a complaint about the dinner, the suit says, Mr. Chien said women were not invited because they would “kill the buzz.” Ms. Pao’s digital investments with the firm include Flipboard and Jive Software, a business software maker that went public last December. Her suit says that she led Kleiner’s investment in a start-up called RPX, but that Kleiner gave its seat on the company’s board to Mr. Komisar, not Ms. Pao, in retaliation for her harassment claims.

THE TIMELINE

2006

• The start of Ellen Pao’s alleged 6 year sexual harrassment by by Ajit Nazre, an investment partner at the firm• Nazre starts to make unwanted sexual advances towards Pao.• Pao rejects Nazre’s advances resulting in him engaging in, what she describes as, ”offensive, obstructionist and difficult behavior” toward her• Pao “succumbs”, and the pair allegedly have sex a few times (Ms. Pao “succumbed to Mr. Nazre’s insistence on sexual relations on two or three occasions”)• October: she ends the affair• Nazre retaliates against her by cutting her out of meetings and email threads

2007

• Pao complains to senior partners at Kleiner Perkins• Pao gets married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a prominent Wall Street investor who has filed discrimination suits in the past• December: Nazre gets promoted to the head of the firm’s green technology unit, making him Pao’s direct boss, and he is moved to an office directly across from hers• Pao allegedly asks to be switched to the digital investments group

2011

• Fletcher files a racial discrimination suit against the Dakota, the well-known Manhattan apartment building, after its co-op board denied his request to buy an apartment next to his to accommodate Pao and their then-2-year-old daughter

2012

• April: a judge ordered one of Fletcher’s hedge funds liquidated, saying it was insolvent• May 10: Pao files her case alleging sexual harassment against Kleiner Perkins in California Superior Court in San Francisco• May 30: John Doerr issues a strongly worded statement, saying the firm had conducted an internal investigation and found her charges “false”• June 5: Ellen Pao posts on Quora she is not going to quit, with the support of commentators such as Dave McClure, a of the darling of the Valley

THE PLAYERS

Kleiner Perkins

The Harvard/ Goldman Sachs/ Chanel of Venture Capital if you will. Kleiner Perkins has been known to highlight the fact that nine of its 38 investment partners are women. But Pao’s suit said that behind the scenes, women were passed over for promotions and given a smaller share of the firm’s profits.

Ellen Pao

Pao, a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in electrical engineering, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, worked at Microsoft, Tellme Networks, Danger Research, and BEA. Before joining Kleiner, Ms. Pao served in various roles at BEA Systems, a software maker that Oracle acquired in 2008.

Pao joined Kleiner Perkins in 2005 as John Doerr’s chief of staff and a junior partner with the firm.

John Doerr

Kleiner Perkins’ most famed investor, backed Netscape, Amazon.com, and Google. But his push into cleantech hasn’t gone nearly as well.

Nor, according to Pao’s lawsuit, has his handling of her complaints. Pao, who started at Kleiner as Doerr’s chief of staff, said she told Doerr about male partners’ behavior on several occasions between 2007 and 2011.

After Pao’s lawsuit became public, Doerr issued a strongly worded statement, saying the firm had conducted an internal investigation and found her charges “false.”

Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher, Jr.

Pao’s controversial husband and hedge-fund manager whose own legal history has fascinated followers of the case. In 1991, he sued his then-employer, Kidder, Peabody & Company, saying it was severely underpaying him because he was black. An arbitration panel awarded him $1.3 million in that suit.

Last year he filed a racial discrimination suit against the Dakota, the well-known Manhattan apartment building, after its co-op board denied his request to buy an apartment next to his to accommodate Ms. Pao and their then-2-year-old daughter.

To make things even more juicy, two men previously working for Fletcher as contractors sued Fletcher for sexual harassment. Both reached confidential settlements. Before marrying Pao, Fletcher lived with a man and has received an award from the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus in 2005 for his efforts in philanthropy and civil rights.

Fletcher and Pao are both members of the Aspen Institute’s 2007 class of Crown Fellows, a prestigious business leadership award where they met. Crown Fellows spend 24 days together in seminars which stretch over two years. Pao and Fletcher married in 2007.

Ajit Nazre

A former SAP executive, Nazre joined Kleiner Perkins in 2003 as part of the firm’s push into cleantech investing.

Pao alleged that Nazre pressured her to have sex with him beginning with a business trip they took together to Germany in February 2006. Later that year, she had a brief sexual relationship with him, then broke things off.

She alleged that Nazre subsequently retaliated by cutting her out of meetings and email discussions.

In April, VentureWire and other outlets reported Nazre’s departure from Kleiner Perkins. That came after Kleiner had launched an internal investigation of Pao’s complaints.

Nothing’s been heard from Nazre since.

Ray Lane

Allegedly told Pao to solve her problem by marrying Nazre. Lane, the former COO of Oracle, joined Kleiner in 2000 as one of the architects of its push into green technology investing. That hasn’t gone well—notable investments include Fisker, which has proven to be an also-ran to Tesla Motors in the electric-car race.

Pao said that she took her complaints about Nazre to Lane and said that Lane didn’t act on them because he was Nazre’s “mentor.” Lane allegedly suggested to Pao that she resolve the issue by marrying Nazre.

Lane is not involved in the $525 million fund that Kleiner Perkins raised earlier this year, and—besides dealing with this lawsuit—he has his hands full as executive chairman of Hewlett-Packard, the ailing tech giant which recently announced it would lay off 27,000 employees.

By the way, Lane married Stephanie Herle, then one of his administrative assistants at Oracle, in 1995, after divorcing his first wife.

Randy Komisar

Pao says this Kleiner partner gave her a book of “playful and provocative” drawings. A cofounder of Claris and former lawyer for Apple, joined Kleiner Perkins in 2005, the same year as Pao. On Valentine’s Day in 2007, Pao alleged that Komisar gave her a copy of The Book of Longing and asked her out to dinner. According to the book’s front-flap description, it features “playful and provocative” drawings. Pao’s complaint says they’re sexually explicit.

Here’s Komisar talking about the lack of women in venture capital from a 2010 interview posted on YouTube:

There are not enough women in venture capital today. Venture capital tends to be clubby in the sense that you tend to have confidence and trust and perhaps better communication with people that you feel more like than people you feel less like. And that applies across gender as well.

Komisar went on to note that a younger generation of venture capitalists seemed more comfortable with diversity—including gender diversity.

In 2011, Pao alleged that Komisar told her that women weren’t successful at Kleiner Perkins because they were “quiet.”

Ted Schlein

Pao says her boss, Ted Schlein, didn’t bring her out to meetings on business trips.

Schlein runs Kleiner’s digital investing efforts. Pao started reporting to Schlein in December 2009 after repeatedly asking to be transferred out of Kleiner’s cleantech group where she worked with Nazre, according to her complaint.

In October 2011, according to Pao, Schlein and another male partner flew with Pao in Schlein’s private jet to an event for CIOs in New York. On two nights, Pao said, Schlein and the other partner attended evening business events and didn’t include Pao.

At a Kleiner Perkins party in Palo Alto, Calif. last month, according to Reuters reporter Sarah McBride, Schlein and other partners avoided Pao:

There, Pao held court on one side of the room, greeted with hugs and hearty handshakes by a number of start-up entrepreneurs she has worked with. Meanwhile, other Kleiner partners at the bash– including Matt Murphy and Ted Schlein– clutched their drinks and steered clear of their suddenly famous colleague.

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Venture capitalist Ellen Pao is suing her employer, Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination and retaliation following alleged incidents of sexual harassment stretching back five years.

So you can imagine there's not much they agree on.

Save for this: In early 2007, a Kleiner partner, Randy Komisar, gave Pao a copy of the Book of Longing, a collection of poems and drawings by Leonard Cohen. This came shortly after the breakoff of an affair Pao had with another colleague, Ajit Nazre.

In her complaint, Pao portrays it as an erotic Valentine's Day present, accompanied by an invitation to a Saturday-night dinner. Kleiner says it was a late holiday gift.

We went online and ordered a copy sent to our local library branch and picked it up.

We read the Book of Longing. We could not believe our eyes.

Cohen's work is challenging and provocative. It is also, as they say, not safe for work. We bookmarked pages with words or pictures that a reasonable adult might find racy. That ended up being about 40 percent of the book.

In any normal workplace, a coworker giving such a gift would probably have been marched out by HR.

If Pao's lawsuit tells us anything, it is that Kleiner is not a normal workplace.